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Rankings of countries where countries face the smallest bribery risk

The country where companies face the lowest risk of being asked to pay a bribe is Denmark, a new study finds.

According to the 2020 TRACE Bribery Risk Matrix, Denmark carried the lowest risk of bribery among the 194 countries and regions analyzed. South Korea stood at 22nd, one step higher than last year.

The study was recently published by Trace International, a US-based non-profit organization that provides solutions for bribery prevention, management and compliance.

The study, conducted in 2014 for the first time and annually since 2016, assesses bribery risk across four domains: the maturity and degree of interaction between the government and the private sector, social attitudes toward bribery and the government’s ability to execute bribery prevention laws, the transparency of the government, and civil society’s ability to monitor and uncover corruption and other irregularities.

Rankings of countries where countries face the smallest bribery risk

In contrast with other global surveys that assess the overall amount of corruption in countries, the TRACE Matrix focuses on the risk of private companies being asked for bribes by government agencies that hold regulatory and licensing authority.

Denmark ranked first in all assessment categories except for government transparency, where it ranked third. Norway, Finland, and Sweden occupied second, third, and fourth place, reaffirming that the countries of Northern Europe suffer the least from bribery.

New Zealand slid to fifth place, down from first in 2019, because of a relatively low ranking in civil society’s monitoring ability.

South Korea (22nd), Japan (21st) and the US (23rd) exhibited a similar risk of bribery. While Korea scored better than before in the areas of interaction with the government (16th) and government transparency (15th), it lost ground in social attitudes toward bribery and the enforcement of bribery laws (35th).

The US slid eight ranks from 2019, as assessments of government transparency and interaction continued to worsen under the administration of US President Donald Trump. Japan jumped four ranks by boosting its scores in all areas but civil society’s monitoring ability.

The situation in China is improving because of continuing reforms of its bureaucratic system. Even so, the country still stood at 126th, indicating that there’s still a substantial risk of being asked for a bribe.

The survey found that bribery risk hasn’t decreased in most countries in Central and South America, with the exceptions of Uruguay (29th) and Chile (33rd).

By Park Jung-eon, deputy editor of Economy Insight

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